From Law.com

January 02, 2012

What's on George Washington's resume? 5th Circuit clerk pens book organizing, scoring former and potential presidents on eight constitutional metrics

The Republican presidential primary season begins tomorrow, and Jamin Soderstrom (pictured) says he has written a nonpartisan book that voters can use to sort out competing candidates’ credentials. He’s created résumés for them, compared them and assigned them scores. “We’re all struggling to figure out what’s the best way to choose who to vote for,” says Soderstrom, a law clerk for 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Senior Judge Harold DeMoss in Houston. During the 2004 presidential election season, Soderstrom says he thought about the importance employers place on a job candidate’s résumé. “I started looking around to see if any presidential candidates had résumés and couldn’t find any,” he says. That search was the genesis for Soderstrom’s book, “Qualified: Candidate Resumes and the Threshold for Presidential Success.” The U.S. Constitution either directly or indirectly requires presidential candidates to meet eight criteria, Soderstrom says: legislative, executive, military, foreign and private work experience; education/intellect; and writing and public speaking ability. Soderstrom took four years to research and write the book, in which he compiled résumés for 43 presidents and 17 current or potential presidential candidates, highlighting their experience in each of the eight categories. He then scored each person based on the sum of the points each individual's résumé earned in each category. Soderstrom says he found a correlation between the former presidents résumé scores and a nonpartisan ranking of those presidents' success in “Presidential Leadership: Ranking the Best and the Worst in the White House,” an October 2000 survey of 132 professors of history, law and political science. “Creating the résumés of presidents was helpful for the historical benchmark, to see what the qualifications of former presidents were and how they translated into success or failure,” he says. Soderstrom says that the book, self-published with iUniverse of Bloomington, Ind., was released in October and is designed to be a reference tool for voters. “It lays out, in an objective, nonpartisan manner, what it takes for a candidate to actually be prepared for the office of the president,” he says. The book is available on amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com, and it can be downloaded to all e-readers, he says. Based on their respective résumés, the two public figures who are the most qualified presidential candidates are Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, he says. “I don’t expect readers to agree 100 percent with my analysis of each president or each candidate’s qualifications; I expect and encourage disagreement,” he says. Soderstrom says he hopes the book will help start a national conversation about how to evaluate candidates. He says he also hopes that “when our grandkids look back, they’ll say ‘Yes, that generation selected an excellent president who really made the country a better place.’ ”-- Jeanne Graham